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Why I stopped writing about photography from Ag33 |
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I have long held the view that to be writing weekly columns about art and photography, as I was for so many years, is not the way to keep eyes alert and opinions fresh and spontaneous. It is the process by which individuals become well-known for holding certain entrenched and strident views which they repeat more or less at every opportunity. Too often critics give the impression of writing out of duty to meet a weekly deadline. I found this process wearisome but, nevertheless, kept cranking out the copy only because I felt my position and income vulnerable. By the end I wasn’t writing because I had anything particularly original or interesting to impart, but because I needed to fill that space. Critics should write only when they have an important and original observation to convey, and preferably one they haven’t stated repeatedly before in the same place. For me, there was also the duty of seeing everything that was on. Over the years this had the cumulative effect of undermining the reason why I visited art galleries in the first place. As a teenager in the 1960s I was enthused by looking and searching in Manchester’s museums. I entered galleries then, as I do now, full of anticipation and expectation. I couldn’t wait to get to the library to find out anything at all about John Hoyland or Mark Lancaster whose abstractions - the first abstract pictures I had ever seen, had intrigued me in the university’s Whitworth Art Gallery. After years as a jobbing scribbler, this enthusiasm had evaporated. I was barely looking at all, merely fitting pictures to preconceived ideas of what I had come to believe photography was and should be. I had made up my mind about photography and roped it down and anything which would undermine my view was conveniently sidestepped. Any decent editor would have fired me years before I actually gave up. My attitude now to all art, even as the editor of a monthly art newsletter, is that I take the trouble to see something not because it is showing and because I feel there ought to be a professional obligation to attend everything, but because I want to see it and it meets a personal need. Even at the expense of short-changing my subscribers I refuse to attend for the purpose of ticking an event off a list - an approach I suspect of some others. Too often I have found that dutiful attendance with a view to writing thwarts the relaxed satisfaction of looking. Thus is the restorative, escapist raison d’être of art undermined. Next Page >> |
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